Elizabeth Banks, what was the scariest or grossest thing for you?

Banks: That's easy. Rooker. [Laughs.] No, seriously, we shot this movie at night in Vancouver in the winter, and it was cold. Sometimes you look back at a movie and you think you had fun, but it kind of sucked, but even now, with some distance to the project, it was so much fun. I didn't even mind having KY jelly being smeared on me. The only thing that bothered me was walking around with bare feet.

Rooker: The floor was covered with broken fake glass, splinters, feathers. It actually protected your feet after a while.James Gunn, it sounds like there were some tough things to deal with as the director while filming?

Gunn: It was tough. Our movie was very, very difficult, and they had to deal with stuff that wasn't always so pleasant, but because the people, our crew, were all 100 percent committed, it really worked. On this movie, all of our stars were treating everyone equally. I honestly got really lucky with these people.

Rooker: We couldn't go back to our trailers; we were too far away to go hanging out in our trailer. We were forced to hang out together.

Fillion: It was freezing cold rain all the time, and we were under tents with a furnace blaring and huddling together to keep warm.

Banks: It got really cold.

Rooker: It was all of a sudden. You wouldn't feel cold, but all of a sudden you'd start shivering.Michael Rooker, you also had a good share of makeup to contend with, at least for your transformation at the end, when you become the creature. Was that fun?

Rooker: That was hard. I was literally there in the middle of the night, at 3 a.m., about five hours before any of these other schmucks were there. The worst part was taking it off—too fast and it would rip your skin, and too slow, ooh!

Gunn: He put up with a lot of pain. ... I don't think many people would put up with what he had to put up with.

Rooker: I was there with this great [makeup artist] Todd Masters, and he had to make sure I wasn't falling asleep, and he'd shake me if I was snoring and also say, "Stop talking, you'll break the seal." There were various levels of makeup. It was a little bit painful at times. It was OK. My neck hurt a little bit after I was carrying around that prosthetic arm.Nathan Fillion, you had just come from Firefly and Serenity, where the cast seemed real close too. Was it the same sort of camaraderie?

Fillion: Yes, to tell you the truth. The best thing you can ask for is a group of people who like and respect each other and respect their talent, and I had that. You can't fail if you have that. You can't [fail] when you're surrounded by talent, and the only thing you can do is not suck.So, James Gunn, did you have to figure out this creature well in advance?

Gunn: I had to map out the whole biology of the creature pretty early on, but I think it is still something that only I understand.

Banks: I didn't know what I was saying when trying to describe it. It didn't make any sense.

Fillion: He would try to explain it, but we gave up.

Gunn: I'd have to stop them sometimes and say, "Hey, you can't do that because he's connected to this guy's brain, and so you can't," so the cast just delivered the lines sometimes—

Banks: Then he gave me this entire exposition line [when we're all] in the car about how he's conscious, or has a conscience, and I couldn't figure out what the—I was like, "I shouldn't be talking. I should just [be] pointing up, and saying "They came from up there" should have been it.

Gunn: You kept giggling after each take. You know, I really like that scene in the car because it's really funny, but they kept giggling. But [Banks] delivered it so dramatically.

Banks: I was sure it was going to get cut out. I kept wondering why I was even talking, and I didn't know what I was even talking about.

Gunn: I did think to myself a few times, "Why do I keep it going on?" But I just let it go and it worked.Rooker, I heard that you really saw some insight into the script, some religious aspects?

Rooker: When I first read it, I thought this is really a wonderful love story.

Gunn: He would come up to me with notes, and he would say, "This is beautiful, this is great, she gives birth in a manger, just like Mary.'"

Rooker: And there's the hay, and cows and sheep—they're dead, of course—and wow, she's in a little manger. She's giving birth to a new human race. It was a wonderful.Gregg Henry, did you do any ad-libbing in this movie? There are some great lines that will be repeated for years.

Henry: That's true, but everything I said was written by James Gunn.

Fillion: All the lines you thought were funny came from me.As the writer/director, did you mind that?

Gunn: We let them improv. Most of the lines are scripted, but we added lines at the last minute. Nathan and I did that a lot—say this, and he'd say that. When he sees the monster getting attached to the naked fat man and he says, "That's some f---ed up sh--", that was scripted about two seconds before. We'd throw out ideas. The line "That fell off my dick during the war" was something I threw out, like, five minutes before, and that guy didn't have a line in the movie either, so he was happy.Were you thankful that you didn't have so much computer-generated stuff, and the costumes and creations were in front of you?

Banks: Sure. You have a situation and you have a lot more information, but seeing it is better. You get there and you have a visual and can have something [more] to say.

Fillion: Yeah, like seeing the guy's ass hanging out and rubbing his body into the thing.

Bank: He was the inspiration.Are there any moments that surprised you when seeing it with an audience, as far as the reactions?

Gunn: I've screened the movie for horror movie fans, but it was scarier going in last night, for people like you folks, who are watching it and critiquing how good [or] how is it bad. And other directors are there—they have something to prove, or not, and people's agents and managers are there, and you know they would much rather be seeing Capote.

Rooker: I thought it was great. I was watching the audience and saw some people doing some eye covering and saw some scared people.

Gunn: All I did was watch Nathan's mom the whole time.

Fillion: She said she was light-headed earlier in the day, and she hates movies like this, so I would say, "OK, here comes one," and I would warn her about the jumps. I looked like an ass in one of the scenes, my scene, with the deer, and I jumped too!

Rooker: You know what that reminds me of? Throw Momma from the Train, where she smacks the guy with a frying pan. Smack! I saw it 50 times before I could not flinch, even when you know it's coming, that smack.

Gunn: I'm so sick of this movie being compared to Throw Momma from the Train.

Banks: A lot of good laugh lines were lost because of the laughter in the audience.

Gunn: That's good, that will bring them back. On all the front pages today—the same day as this press conference—there are reports of water discovered on one of the moons of Saturn and the possibility of life there. What do you think of that, and what do each of you think about life on other planets? And have we been visited?

Gunn: I love it, I love the reports of possible life on other planets. I actually like this theory that they talked about of life being created in water, and life came from the planet Mars many millions of years ago. So [they say] life was initially created on Mars, which could have come here on a meteor, and in fact life on Earth started on Mars. I love that. As a kid I always drew Martians, so I love the fact that I might be a Martian.

Fillion: For real, it's out there, the odds of it not happening more than once are outrageous. It's out there.

Banks: I'm open to it, that's certainly a possibility.

Henry: Sure, why not?

Rooker: My cousin Earl is a Martian. He has the accent to prove it. He has a ray gun, he really is one. James Gunn, your wife Jenna Fischer from The Office was in the movie, too. Was that planned?

Gunn: No, that was actually a last-minute replacement. We had shot a lot of the scenes with Nathan and Shelby, but the actor who was in the part backed out on us just two days before shooting to go do a TV pilot, and I said, "Thank God, because it's a name that could be a guy or girl." My wife was with us on the shoot, so I rewrote the lines for my wife, to fit a woman.Who are your main influences?

Gunn: The biggest thing single influence is [David] Cronenberg. What I like about Cronenberg is that his movies aren't always scary, but they're creepy as hell, and so I just wanted to bring some of that to it. I wanted to bring some of that creepiness back. And movies like The Fly are actually quite humorous. I thought Jeff Goldblum deserves an Academy Award for that Brundlefly performance. ... All those movies of the '80s, Exterminator, Basket Case, all of the Frank Henenlotter movies.

I think he's an underrated guy, and John Carpenter's The Thing was a huge influence, and also those Universal movies of the 1940s. ... The monsters were great from that era—The Creature From the Black Lagoon and all the monsters where the message is that they love too much and if you love you'll be destroyed.You worked with Troma for a long time. How did that help you?

Gunn: Lloyd Kaufman, from Troma, you may know, has a cameo in the film [as the sad drunk], and they may be considered schlockmeisters, but they love what they do. Troma does what kept them alive 30 years, and they're barely able to scrape by, but they taught me about passion and perseverance. I didn't go to film school, and I learned how to make a movie from preproduction to how to release it in theaters, from location scouting to how to deal with the MPAA, all this stuff that was a very practical education.

Rooker: You don't learn that in school.Did you have any problems with ratings with the MPAA?

Gunn: [Director] Eli Roth is a good friend and very talented guy, and he gave them Hostile just before we gave him this movie. We didn't have a problem with the MPAA. We are eternally grateful. If you watch the actual amount of gore, we actually have a lot more gore, but because we're surreal we actually get away with a lot more. We have tons and tons of extra material because I tried to cut Rooker out as much as possible [laughs].Nathan Fillion, how is White Noise 2 any different? How are you trying to make the sequel any different?

Fillion: I go to work every day and I say "How do I save this movie?" [Laughter.] So with White Noise 2, I said let's go with Whiter Noise, or White Noisier, Still White Noise After All These Years, something like that. ... In this movie I have a near-death experience and I become the detuned receiver. I can see how the white noise, I can see it but nobody else can, so people think I'm crazy. How is he different from Malcom Reynolds on Serenity?

Fillion: Malcom Reynolds didn't want to be a hero. He refused that role; he was kind of thrust into it, and Bill Barty [in Slither] could not handle regular police work, never mind these extreme circumstances. Not only is he irresponsible and ill-prepared, he's a calm guy. He says, "Let me think a second." He's trying to hold onto the girl he's got a crush on, and she's married. He's not the cool guy, he's a real person.

Gunn: Bill has dealt with life where the bar has been extremely low for him. Suddenly the bar has been lifted much higher. He's excelled, he's chief of police, but because he's chief of Wheelsy, that's not saying much.Elizabeth Banks, you're back as Betty Brant in Spider-Man 3, right?

Banks: Yes, I am. Will you have more to do?

Banks: Well, I learned my lesson a long time ago that everything can be cut.Did you know that she is Peter Parker's first girlfriend?

Banks: I do know that. You should maybe write Sam Raimi a letter. I'm very aware of [the character's history]. Make him aware. Tell him I'm actually Venom!What is the movie that scares each of you?

Fillion: Jaws changed my life. I can't go into a pool without looking around. I look for reasons to hate sharks.

Banks: Well, for me it was Poltergeist and clowns, and Alien for the female ass-kicking heroine.

Henry: The end of Carrie gets me every time, every time.

Rooker: I like musicals. I was forced to watch them as a child; my parents dropped me off at theater. I liked Climb Every Mountain.

Gunn: You know, we're all wondering if you're being serious or not, Rooker. Well, my favorite scary movie is Rosemary's Baby. That's frightening.Will there be a sequel?

Gunn: Not for me. I don't know.

Henry: I'd prefer a prequel [insinuating something bad happens to his character].

Fillion: I'm very excited about this coming out on March 31, just a few days after my birthday, March 27. It would be a great birthday present if everyone goes out to see it.